Armed with a nontraditional pricing model and an AI vision that will allow end users to solve routine and mundane requests, such as password resets or troubleshooting a slow PC, autonomously, IT platform player Atera has carved itself a 5% share of the $388 million software market for MSPs, according to industry analyst firm Canalys. And the all-in-one RMM/PSA vendor, which sits in the number 5 spot behind leaders ConnectWise, Kaseya, N-able, and NinjaOne, is on the move.
The Tel Aviv, Israel-based company opened a U.S. office in March of this year and appointed Yoav Susz (pictured above) as GM for the U.S. In May, the company held its annual online partner conference, Ateraverse ’24, with 5,000 attendees, and announced its all-new AI Co-pilot for technicians, which includes Mac support and remote session summaries. And this week, the company announced it received Texas Risk and Authorization Management Program (TX-RAMP) Level 2 certification. TX-RAMP’s security requirements are similar to FedRAMP but it’s tailored to meet the state’s needs.
Reducing Ticket Escalation With AI
Next up is an AI-based Auto-pilot solution that promises to significantly reduce the number of tickets that require technician interaction. In alpha testing now, Atera expects to be in beta by year-end, with availability some time in 2025, according to Susz, who says they already have over 100 use cases.
Auto-pilot and Co-pilot are both part of Atera’s Action AI initiative, which it has been working on in partnership with Microsoft for the past two and a half years.
With Auto-pilot, “the idea there is that if we can take a lot of the relatively rudimentary, repetitive menial tasks that they’re doing, we can free them up to work on more customers,” Susz tells MSP Success. “And as we know for MSPs, if you can take the output of one technician and increase it by 30%, that’s sometimes 30% more revenue for the business.”
It’s a better experience for the end user too, he says, because they’re not waiting for a tech to open and resolve a ticket. “What we’re seeing today with the 300 or so design partners that we’re working with is that it’s able to reduce between 20 to 40% of the tickets that get escalated to human technicians. And that is where things become revolutionary.”
Product-Led Growth
Founded in 2016, “Atera started off as a product-led-growth company,” Susz says. “We didn’t have salespeople; we didn’t have customer success [reps]. Basically we had MSPs finding and learning about Atera primarily through messaging boards and Reddit and those kind of forums.” Today, Atera has over 7,000 MSP partners, with about 70% in the U.S., Susz says. “We work everywhere from MSPs which have two or three people on staff to MSPs with dozens of employees and tens of thousands of endpoints. We really kind of span the gamut in terms of size of businesses that we’re working with.”
Unlike the traditional RMM/PSA providers that price per endpoint, Atera prices per technician. The solution has different tiers of pricing, depending on the functionality included. Co-pilot is priced separately and is available across all tiers of the RMM/PSA; Auto-pilot will follow the same model.
“I think that being able to have pricing by technician [for the RMM/PSA] rather than per endpoint allows them to forecast better, allows them to understand how much they’re going to be paying. It’s less volatility when you bring on a new customer, when you part with a customer. Your pricing is not going to fluctuate all that much, so it gives them a lot of transparency,” Susz says.
Competitive Moves On Pricing
MSP pricing has been under the microscope this year, with key players Kaseya rolling out a low-cost bundle earlier this year, NinjaOne and HaloPSA following suit with their bundle, and ConnectWise promising to respond.
Asked if Atera plans to respond to competitors’ pricing, Susz says, “I think we’re concentrated on doing our thing. We’ve had dozens of customers move from our competitors, which are all fantastic companies, to us for multiple reasons. Some of it is about the pricing model, sometimes it’s about the ease of use, the all-in-one. …Integrations are important and fantastic and necessary in our industry, but it’s still a different proposition from something which is built on the same code base.”
Susz adds that Atera does not plan to build out its platform with cybersecurity or backup offerings like some of its competitors. ConnectWise, for instance, recently acquired Axcient and SkyKick.
“Right now, I would say that we’re focused very much on AI, and we have been focused on AI for the past couple of years, and we’re going to continue to.” He adds, “We think that that’s one of the key differentiators that we have alongside our simplicity and our business model. We have a very strong integration strategy for cybersecurity [and] backup. We have dozens of really, really fantastic partners, which we deeply integrate with. To the best of my knowledge at this point, it’s not something that we’re going to pursue developing independently, but we’re going to continue building an ecosystem.”
Grabbing More Market Share
To penetrate into the top 3 or 4 spot in the RMM/PSA market, Jay McBain, principal analyst with Canalys, says Atera has to develop more of a presence in the channel. Today, Atera has “5% of a nice size market, but for them to get to 10% or for them to get into this top three, they’re going to have to deploy a community model,” he says. That includes exhibiting at events, speaking on stage, and bringing in a community builder, he explains.
“For 25 years [the channel] has been a community-led model. …You’re going to have to do it event by event. And you’re going to have to do it in hand-to-hand combat. That’s how you break free,” McBain says. “They’ve already broken free because their product’s good, but you’ve got others like Halo and Synchro that also have strong growth. And then to hit where ConnectWise and Kaseya and N-able and NinjaOne are now, they’re all visible every day, everywhere. And that’s who you have to be if you want a bigger chunk of this $400 million market.”
Susz says word of mouth has been key to growth to date, but Atera is “doing a lot of conferences and we’re ramping that up. We’ve been, this year, at quite a few conferences here in the U.S. focused on MSPs, and we’re going to continue to go to conferences. We’re doing a lot of digital outreach still, which is working very well for us. Those are the main things here in the U.S. market, the main strategies that we’re deploying.”
Atera does have a partner program, but it is not a one size fits all, so benefits vary, he says.
Efficiency = Value
Susz believes Atera’s focus on improving technician efficiency with AI, their pricing model, and their single code base RMM/PSA will continue to differentiate them in the market. “We’re really here to try and empower MSPs and make them more efficient. … I think that presents a really big opportunity for the MSPs because it means that they can do more with less. And in a time where MSPs are being asked to do more and more, anywhere that you can get that efficiency gain, I think there’s a lot of value in that.”